Happy New Year! ?
We’re happy to be starting off the year with a new product update for January.
We’ve added several new add-ons to facilitate your investment management, announced a partnership with Fintech Station, and continue to improve your user experience on Wealthica.
But before we go further into our product update, an early 2020 Reddit thread on the Wealthica Subreddit caught our attention a few days ago: @Zhnn asking Why is Wealthica free?
Why is Wealthica Free?
That’s a question that comes up regularly.
As we answered on Reddit, We’re a team of developers that don’t like politics, we’re trying to get to financial institutions (and/or advisors) through the power of our user base. If you’d like to hear an audio answer to the question, Simon answered it on a Fintech Impact Podcast (at 10m55s).
Developing a large enough customer base gives us credibility and awareness in front of financial institutions that otherwise wouldn’t pay attention. This attention leads to opportunities which ultimately leads to monetization.
That’s the main reason why Wealthica is free.
We don’t have a big marketing budget, we invest our money in development and technology so you, the users, play the ambassadors and marketing team role.
Your pay is getting to use Wealthica for free. ?
This being said, we do currently monetize.
Within Wealthica, we’re selling paid advanced features like Wealthscope Scorecard (which is currently offered at 15% off) and the Google Spreadsheet Export in the add-ons section. We’re working on introducing a paid Premium subscription that would offer additional features. We’re also selling our platform and our technology to financial advisors and other software companies.
In addition to monetizing through Wealthica and paid add-ons, we also own Stockchase which we also acquired for marketing reasons. Through Stockchase, we sell a Premium Subscription which brings in a significant number of new paid accounts monthly.
We also promote partner offerings like our Questrade Review or Borrowell’s Free Credit Report through our personal Identity Theft Story. Those partners pay us commissions for users that signup with them. We select our partners diligently and only promote services or offers we would use or buy ourselves.
If you want to support our work and the ongoing development of both Wealthica and Stockchase, you’re invited to signup for the offers or join Stockchase Premium (until we launch Wealthica Premium).
What’s new on Wealthica in January
The development team closed 2019 hard at work fixing small bugs. ?
In addition to a major refactor of connection with Manulife and Computershare,
The connectors to many institutions have been enhanced : BMO SmartFolio, AdviceDirect, Investia, RBC Bank, NBIN, Credential Securities, SunLife ,CIBC, RBC, Coast Capital, Desjardins, WealthBar, EdwardJones, GreatWest, Scotia Bank, InvestorLine, TD EasyWeb, Solium, LendingLoop and EQ Bank are among the financial institutions’ connectors that have been improved.
Teaming up with Finance Montréal
We recently announced teaming up with Finance Montréal as an official partner of the Montréal Fintech Station. We’ll be offering free access to our API to Fintech Station startups and developers. With the API, startups will have the opportunity to integrate functionalities of Wealthica into their offering. Read more about the deal, and what Fintech Station is, here.
Wealthscope : 15% Off First Year
As you probably noticed in previous product updates, we’ve partnered up with Wealthscope to bring you an objective second opinion on your investment portfolio. Wealthscope provides a scorecard that grades your portfolio on diversification, downside protection, performance, income, and fees. The scorecard is available to all Wealthica users through a monthly or annual subscription. The yearly subscription is available at 15% Off for a limited time. We recently published a detailed post with screenshots for you to have a better understanding and preview of Wealthscope. Read it here.
New Add-On : Export/Import to Yahoo! Finance
Third-party developer and Wealthica user Kamp Douangkeo published a new add-on, which is available to all Wealthica users for free, that allows you to export your holdings to a CSV file that you can import into Yahoo! Finance to get all your stocks into Yahoo! Finance instantly. This new add-on proves very useful if you like to use Yahoo! Finance mobile app to stay informed about the stocks you watch or own. Lear more about exporting your holdings to Yahoo! Finance.
Do more with Lending Loop
Last month, we announced support for peer-2-peer lending platform Lending Loop. If it’s one of your financial institutions, we wrote a new post about how you can get the full picture of your investment portfolio including LendingLoop. You can read it here.
Thank You!
Thanks so much for a wonderful 2019! We wish everyone a happy, healthy and wealthy 2020.
Did you miss our December product update? You can read last month’s update here.
